Where ideal is subjective

Back in 2009, I wrote this post, which eventually became one of my most commented on and viewed post. In the days of nascent social media, it connected me to a lot of fellow Spanish football fans most of who I am still in touch with. That was 9 years ago.

2009 was also the season when Cristiano came to La Liga, for the club I follow – Real Madrid. Since then, Real Madrid has won 2 league titles, 2 Spanish Cups, 2 Spanish Super Cups, 4 Champions League titles, 2 UEFA Super Cups and 3 Club World Cups. He finally moved out of Real Madrid, going to Juventus this season. Apart from all these trophies and awards, his stay at Madrid has been bookended by Indian broadcasters not doing the fans any favour.

Back in 2009 we had to make do with YouTube highlights (what is 1080p?), patchy live streams with 2009 internet in India. This year, won’t be as bad because Facebook has bought the official broadcast rights, so it won’t be completely absent. But given that most of India still doesn’t have streamable internet speeds and the fact that Facebook is evil, we lose again.

Not sure what La Liga is doing here though. The second largest population in the world, with slow internet, and EPL still being the most popular football property in the country, they should ideally have insisted on TV broadcast. Especially after losing one of the two most marketable footballer on the planet, you should be pushing it even more. You need more people watching Valencia, Villareal and the super entertaining Real Betis to make La Liga more popular and not give people an option to choose only what they want, which in most cases will only be the big 2 (maybe 3).

The league officially begins in 6 days, and Sony has confirmed they don’t have the rights. Inspite of consuming a lot of streamable content, I still do all of it on TV. Also, I have deactivated my Facebook account for over a year now, not sure if I can bear to go back to it. So unless one of the TV sports channels does something drastic, I might be stuck with minimum football again this year, especially after watching one of the best World Cups ever.

I am a big sports fan. A big football fan. And a huge Real Madrid fan.

Last year, Real Madrid won the tenth European Championship for clubs. An undeniably massive feat. It was an absolute pleasure to watch the match where they won it all with fellow fans. Ecstatic. Delirious. Are some of the words that can describe the night. And also emotional.

The tenth trophy has been hyped up and blown up by every fan and follower of the team. It is the mythical number no team has ever reached. It didn’t matter that no team has ever reached 9 either. It is something about the tenth, or La Decima. Players and fans have been praying for years for La Decima. And once they won it, you could see players cutting their beloved long locks and colouring their beard blonde in an apparent display of their resolutions being successful.

A couple of weeks back, I got the chance to visit the practice sessions of the Jai Jawan Mandal thanks to my friend Radhika and her MPhil thesis. The Jai Jawan Mandal is one of the many associations of young men and very few women in Mumbai who wait for an entire year for one day. The day of Gokulashtami. The birthday of Lord Krishna.

This is a festival, celebrated by mimicking the God’s famed liking to homemade butter. His mother would tie the pot of butter to the roof to keep it away from little Krishna, but he would find ways to break the pot for his butter. Today, we celebrate by building human towers to reach a pot of butter tied high up. As with anything involving men and a crowd gathering, it took the form of a competitive sport where the higher your tower, the better you are. Meanwhile, in Spain they build human towers too, just for sport.

This brings me back to the Jai Jawan Mandal. They have taken this street play and perfected it. For them this is more than a festival. More than a game, more than a sport. It is their life. Sounds familiar?

I am not on Facebook anymore. It was getting quite asinine looking at memes and people arguing about who supports Modi and who hates him. I realise I still need an outlet to express what I think is asinine that actually does affect our nation. These are my opinions and as per our genuinely great Constitution, I can express it, on my blog, even if only one person reads it.

Happy Constitution Day.

A 24 year old married woman has been kidnapped by her father, her marriage annulled by the High Court and she has to prove to the Supreme Court that she converted to Islam out of her own volition.

People associated with an unseen and unreleased movie are being given death threats on live television.

The Parliament is not in session because the Prime Minister’s home state is going for election next month.

A defaulting Anil Ambani was given a defence contract no one wants to talk about.

No one wants to talk about the death of Judge Loya who was presiding over the case in which Amit Shah was the chief accused.

A government health minister says you get cancer because of your sins.

The health ministry says pollution never killed anyone and hence not hazardous.

Farmers are protesting naked in the winter and no media cares.

The transport minister and railway minister are moving towards electric transport while the oil minister in the same government is increasing nation’s oil refinery capacity by 3 times.

I hate most ads these days. The execution especially have become woefully bad. What might have seemed like a decent idea even till the storyboard stage, look disastrous post execution.

The Ford airbags ad is one such (sorry, I couldn’t find it on YouTube). There are two versions of this. One in which a 7 year old girl sitting in the backseat of an Ecosport makes a sad face and says “Papa, our car has airbags in the front, but I’m sitting in the back”. To start with, the casting of the kid is really bad. Neither does she look cute, nor does she look approachable and cuddle worthy (sorry little girl). Which is what you need to pull off the ridiculous question she just asked her dad. The little devil basically assumed her dad is a jackass of a driver and going to plunge them to their eventual deaths, and then went ahead and deduced that he is somehow okay with killing her and that’s why he chose to make her sit all by herself at the back. And no, she didn’t ask this in an adorable and sassy way a 3 year old asks these kind of questions. Because she is a freaking 7 year old. I know it looks like I’m hating on the messenger, but I’m actually hating the entire messaging system. The next thing that happens is of course the dad says our Ford car has 6 airbags and you’re safe, which is the point of this whole disaster of an ad. How he does not start weeping in absolute agony over the realisation that his daughter thinks he wants to murder her is beyond me. The voiceover calms everything down by asking you to check the number of airbags in a car before you buy one. Acceptable.

There is another shorter version of this ad, in which the girl is shown in closeup and she smirks and asks my Ford car has 6 airbags, how many do you have? That’s it. However, in these 10 second the character, whose only claim to existence is that she was born in a house which could afford a fully loaded version of a car, essentially shows you the birdie and laughs at your poor ass for not being able to afford a better car. Your kid surely deserves to die.

MUMBAI: On Monday a senior RBI official announced new measures which he said he hopes would potentially and probably ease the suffering suffered by the suffering common sufferer. The new measures came as a huge relief for 7 Indian citizens. This journalist was able to speak with over 50% of these benefited citizens and all of them praised the foresight and compassion shown by the bank and the government, both of whom ironically are called central.

Among others, some of the measures announced were:

All citizens who don’t have bank accounts will be allowed to open new bank accounts in 3 minutes under the ‘Please bank on us’ scheme and will be immediately allowed to withdraw unlimited amounts of money from any ATM in the country. There will however be a limit on their deposits which is set at ₹100 every 17 seconds.

All unmarried people who have kids are allowed to withdraw ₹2 lakhs per kid per day provided they can furnish DNA evidence proving they are the parents of the said kid. This resulted in a lot quick Facebook ‘Relationship Status’ updates, however their children have been depressed ever since they were made aware that they will never be allowed to get a passport or any other government identification which requires both Father’s and Mother’s name, until the time the parents marry each other.

All petrol pumps selling air turbine fuel will accept old and fake notes till 31st March 2019. This is said to be a major relief for all the common men who own cars which work on jet fuel.

All those holding a salary account with any bank and earning a net income of less than ₹10,000 will be outside all withdrawals limit set till date, provided they have a minimum account balance of ₹2 lakhs and own at least 2 credit cards. This is seen as a direct reward for all in the lower and middle income group who have wholeheartedly embraced digital and electronic banking.

Anyone living more than 15 kilometers away from the nearest bank branch are allowed to withdraw any amount they desire if their journey to the bank branch was on foot and they can tender such proof.

All previous announcements made by RBI during ‘Rahu Kaalam’ have been revoked. All citizens benefited by these announcements will be investigated on once the auspicious time for all such investigations are announced by the relevant experts.

All citizens who are suffering from serious withdrawal symptoms post the exit of Arnab Goswami from Times Now are allowed withdraw any amount of cash required to cope with their depression. A qualified dentist’s certificate would be necessary.

All those who take an oath to stop honking while driving are allowed to withdraw ₹25,000 a day and they will be gifted this amount if they uninstall horns from all their vehicles. Bank managers will check the vehicles personally in these cases.

All through Monday there were violent protests by all rich tax payers as they see this as an invasive attack on their evasive practices.

It seemed like stress had taken a toll on Mr. Das as his usually impeccable spectacles looked heavily smudged and his tea-stained tie looked befittingly unfitting. When questioned on the absence of his boss at all public announcements, he said Mr. Patel has been busy signing all the new notes by hand to curb out counterfeiting and honour our soldiers. He then spontaneously started singing the national anthem, visibly moved by the patriotism displayed and sacrifice made by the Governor. Two journalists at the press conference suffered minor injuries. They later disclosed that they were surprised by hearing the national anthem and fearing public displeasure stood up too fast, the movement causing whiplash in their neck and back. They’ve been prescribed painkillers and balm but they said they don’t have cash to pay for the medicine.

​There are certain things that you come across at various points in your life (hopefully) which immediately gives you a sense of such pleasurable bewilderment that you start wondering if you deserve what you are feeling at that very moment. It could be absolute unbridled love towards you by someone or something you experience someone has created. Regardless, either by fate or providence, and seemingly nothing of your doing, you are just present.

Love, in most cases, hopefully, is more or less deserved; the creation however. This creation is not the creator’s only creation but is unlike any other because this one was created only for themselves. It could be a piece of music, a book, a statue, a building, a painting, an inning, a performance, anything. If you experience it the way it is meant to, isolated from everything else, you get so enamored by it you barely realise that you’ve essentially left your plane of existence and entered the creator’s. That moment, you don’t care about externalities, it is just you, the creation and the creator. The next moment you feel you are so lost inside the creator’s world, you get the sense that you might actually be invading their privacy and maybe you’re not supposed to be there. Maybe you’re not meant to have this experience and it is meant only for the creator and no one else. You are not sure if anything created by a mere human could be so fascinating. Should it be so fascinating? And maybe it is so because that was the sole purpose of that human. You begin to wonder why you deserved to experience what you just did. You’ve never met or will never meet the creator and yet somehow you just entered their realm for the briefest of moments. Are you even qualified to feel what you just felt?You understood the creation enough to feel all this, you could appreciate it to the extent not everyone can or will. You definitely earned what you felt.

The creator was probably not brought on earth to create that piece, but maybe to make you experience what you just did.

Everyone loves top 10 lists. Long before Buzzfeed and Scoopwhoop started with their ridiculous top 10 lists, I was one of those people who actually believed in the power of these lists. They are supposed to be awesome because they are brief, succinct, gratifying and super quick.

Here’s my shot at ’10 things’ after a long time. I’m not going to explain any of the points below. Just google. And ya, I don’t claim any of them to be true or factual, it’s off the internet for Bhagwan’s sake!

And in a tribute to Buzzfeed, YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE NUMBER 9!!!

Modi government wants to precede every movie screened in theatres with short clips of their achievements. Dictator style.

Smriti Irani wants IIT students to learn Sanskrit along with their regular classes for Quantum Mechanics and 10 Best Ways to cook Maggi. In 10 years Higgs Boson could be renamed to Higram Bosayanam.

As per data released by the government this week, only 5.1 Crore Indians filed Income Tax returns in 2015-16. This is 4% of our population. Ridiculous even after considering retired people, children and housewives. You can read more here.

The even more ridiculous fact is that out of the above 1.6 Crore people who filed returns, paid zero tax. Which is fine because not everyone earns a lot. The ridiculous part is that only 3.5 Crore people actually paid any tax. Basically businessmen, doctors, traders and a lot of such people earning in cash just don’t bother.

The CJI (basically the woman/man who holds the HIGHEST judicial position in India), literally shed tears in front of PM Modi and quite a few other people at an event. He said we need more judges in an extremely overworked judiciary. Apparently our PM need to be told that, in public, with tears, by THE Supreme Court judge.

Salman Khan is now the ‘Goodwill Ambassador’ for the Indian contingent at the Rio Olympics 2016. That’s it, I have nothing more to say about this.

The ethics committee of the Rajya Sabha, after “going through all the relevant documents” has expelled Vijay Mallya from the House. He is the 15th MP to be expelled; list includes Indira Gandhi and the great Subramanian Swamy. He was elected into RS (for the second time) with the backing of BJP in 2010.

According to an Italian court, the Congress party and Sonia Gandhi allegedly took bribes to give an Italian aviation firm an Indian government contract. Surprise! I wonder why the ruling BJP government has never probed this.

Nearly 1 lakh people are being affected by massive floods in Assam. 1 lakh! Right now. Literally. Let that sink in, pun absolutely unintended. Though only the internet seems to know this. So it might not be true.

A massive fire burnt down the National Museum of Natural History in Delhi. It burnt down fossils, antique valuables and over 60,000(!) volumes of rare books and ‘last prints’. A sliver of the past, lost forever.

BONUS: You remember the pictures of topical sand sculptures every newspaper prints on the eve of any world event? Almost all of them are made by Padma Shri Sudarshan Pattnaik. He won a Gold Medal in the International Sand Art Championship in Russia. Smile for him.

We are in 2016 right now. It has been close to a couple of decades since the Internet became accessible. And a few years before that the PC had become main stream. I am going to obviously talk about the title of this post, in this post. But I have to set this up a little more.

Humans have been copying for centuries. Whether it be actions, reactions, books, music, ideas, creations and everything else. Copying is coded into our DNA since the time we were primates. Most of our learning comes from copying. And most of our evolving came from understanding what we are copying and how we made the copied version better.

The propensity of man to imitate what is before him is one of the strongest parts of his nature.

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872)

Ironically, I copied that quote from a paper on plagiarism. I did it to add more gravitas to this post. Plagiarism comes from the Latin word plagiarius which means a person who abducts the child or slave of another, a kidnapper. The word ‘plagiary’ however, entered the English language in the late 16th century – recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1598. In summary, this has been going on since forever. The definition of any multi-cellular organism is that the cells essentially create copies of itself from one single cell. Heck, we are copiers at the cellular level.

Let’s come back to the 21st century. As the internet evolved from being available at a click on our desks to being available at a tap in our hands, so has the ease with which we obtain information. Today, anyone can write really good and insightful research pieces from literally our beds without opening a single fat book in cobwebbed libraries. In essence, not only can we retrieve loads of information extremely quickly, we can also possibly improve on it, add our personal brand of insight and then relay it further down to like-minded individuals who would love the added perspective. By now you can see where I am going with this.

Right now, we have reached a stage of such an information overload that we don’t even need to click, tap or call for any information. It is fired at us through multiple pages in multiple screens limited only by our internet data plan. These come in the form of long drawn thought pieces or just plain old rants written at the spur of the moment by someone expressing their frustration, lets call them manufacturers. The receivers who are at times meant to be nothing more than just plain readers, take upon themselves the mantle of co-thought leaders and propagate these pieces verbatim (lets call them resellers). The problem I have with this is, I find it hard to believe that in any text, which is more than 25 words long or more than 5 bullet points, there is absolutely nothing that the reseller disagrees with. They merrily copy and paste it, after all it just takes a few taps, and broadcast it to their entire known universe, literally.

I really think we have missed out on the evolving part in all of this. Even our cells which copied themselves from our forefathers realised there wasn’t everything that was useful and discarded those qualities and learnt new qualities which are more relevant. We really have stopped evolving as far as our thoughts are concerned. I see the exact same message texted to me by 3 different people on 2 different platforms and I know for a fact that they are not the same people. Every one of us have different backgrounds and different upbringings. Even twins don’t think the same way as each other except in movies. Where have we lost our individuality? Even though I and my sister are separated by literally nothing but time as far as our lineage is concerned, we know we don’t think alike. Why would I assume someone who is in no way related to me, even though they might support the same team, player, nation or party as I, would by my thought-soulmate?

We don’t need any news filtering app controlled by media agencies or governments or political parties to tell us what we should believe in. All we need is our minds, a few intelligent searches and a few minutes to read. We can all make our own minds for ourselves.